FunGEn (Functional Game Engine) is a cross-platform, BSD-licensed, OpenGL-based 2D game engine written in Haskell. It is intended to help game programmers make games in a faster and more automated way. FunGEn supports:
Home: http://joyful.com/fungen
Docs: here are the original docs from the old site, gradually being merged with this site and updated. Here’s a video of the worms demo.
Latest API docs: single-page or framed
Latest code: http://joyful.com/repos/fungen
Hackage release: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/FunGEn
Discussion: #haskell-game or haskell-cafe
cabal install FunGEnWhat is a game engine?
A game engine can be considered as a library that provides game facilities to a game programmer. When using a game engine, the programmer must specify when the game events happen, rather than how they are implemented. A same functionality may have its implementation varying from platform to platform, in the case the engine is platform-independent. The main advantage of a game engine is that it can be reused to the development of many different kind of games, in an automated way, saving a lot of programming time.
Why Haskell?
We believe that Haskell is a great language to develop games, because of its high level of abstraction and the generation of a more concise, elegant and shorter code. This is great for code maintenance and understanding. Combining the power of Haskell with the facilities provided by game engines seems a promising project. You can find more info on Haskell in its official site.
What is HOpenGL?
HOpenGL stands for Haskell Open Graphics Library. Actually, it is a binding to one of the most famous graphics libraries around the world (OpenGL) and its auxiliary toolkit (GLUT). In other words, it makes possible to call OpenGL/GLUT routines (which were written in the C language) when programming in Haskell. You can find more info on HOpenGL in my HOpenGL Tutorial site, or in its official site.
GHC 6.12-compatible 0.3 released on darcsden & hackage by Simon Michael:
GHC 6.10-compatible 0.1 released on hackage by Miloslav Raus:
GHC 6.8-compatible update by Simon Michael:
First public release by Andre Furtado:
FunGEn v1.0 can be downloaded here. (PLEASE NOTE: this is the very first version of FunGEn, and it was released just to get some feedback from game programmers. You are strongly invited to tell your game programming experiences with FunGEn, helping us to release a definitive, stable version). Ok, after this disclaimer, please fell yourself free to take a quick tour in the site; it contains a lot of useful information for those who are really interested in trying a new game programming experience. Nice coding…
Current Status: Some feedback indicated that the first version of FunGEn was not as “functional” as it was desired: some game issues were still being dealt through an imperative fashion. This way, the authors of this project decided to change the game engine philosophy: programmers should describe a game as a set of “specifications” rather than defining its behavior imperatively. One plausible alternative for accomplishing this task is porting the Clean Game Library (CGL) to Haskell, adding some FunGEn specific features. Hence, this is the actual status of the FunGEn project: it is being rebuilt in order to provide game programming mechanisms following the CGL concepts. This really demands some time, but the authors expect a new version to be released soon.
Andre’s 2002 todo list:
Here you have a list of some upcoming FunGEn features, and some other desired features (but with no implementation prevision yet).
Would you like to suggest a feature? Feel free to do it. Would you like to implement a feature? Please do it! Keep in touch.
FunGEn was created by Andre Furtado, Computation Science graduation student at the Informatics Center (CIn) of the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), as part of a Scientific Iniciation (PIBIC/CNPq) research project (Creating a Game Platform Using Haskell), oriented by lecturer Andre Santos (PhD, 1995, University of Glasgow), who was responsible for figuring out a lot of FunGEn implementation details.
I would like to thank also the following people who contributed for the development of FunGEn:
FunGEn can be distributed freely, in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. I would thank you if you cite my name and this site if you are going to use FunGEn for other things besides home programming.